Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Happy 40 Year Anniversary Information Age 2.0

INTEL -- "The microprocessor has been the engine of the digital revolution that has changed our society dramatically over the past few decades, democratizing access to information and making for a more equalitarian world. This year Intel celebrates the 40th anniversary of the microprocessor and the 40th birthday of the Intel® 4004 which was the first customer-programmable microprocessor to become available on the commercial market."

MP: After the invention of the printing press in the 15th century that started Information Age 1.0, the commercial introduction of the mircochip in 1971 was the second most important information-related breakthrough in human history. Thanks to the introduction of the microprocessor in 1971, we can celebrate this year the 40th year anniversary of Information Age 2.0.

5 Comments:

Not quite, there are two constituent blocks for information age 2.0, the PC and the internet. You can call the microprocessor the engine of the PC, but we had PCs for a decade or so before the internet really took off. And the workhorse of the internet is fiber-optic cables, made possible by a 1970 glass breakthrough at Corning, which led to deployment in the late '70s and finally widespread usage in the '90s. You might want to list both, as a box that can simply store your recipes is fairly useless, until you can connect with others to share those recipes. ;)

What is a tera flop? It is one trillion floating point operations per second.

From Brier Dudley at the Seattle Times:

"It wasn't that long ago that Intel was boasting about the first supercomputer with sustained 1 teraflop performance. That was in 1997, on a system with 9,298 Pentium II chips that filled 72 computing cabinets."